Suspicion was the winner of the Tour de France

By Siegfried Mortkowitz Jul 29, 2007, 17:12 GMT

Paris - The 2007 Tour de France ended on Sunday - to quote the poet T.S. Eliot - not with a bang, but with a whimper.

The whimper was one of relief that the three-week race - with its seemingly endless revelations of doping and cheating - was finally over.

The whimper also represented the impact made by the sporting result of the race on the consciousness of the general public, numbed by the many reports of doping. This was supposed to have been 'the Tour of renewal'; instead, it was very nearly 'the Tour of its own undoing.'

Suspicion trumped sport, cheaters ruled the headlines and the most suspenseful spectacle took place under the microscopes of the French national anti-doping laboratory at Chatenay-Malabry.

According to Patrice Clerc, the head of the organization that runs the Tour: 'The presumption of innocence no longer exists in cycling. The presumption of guilt applies to all the participants. That is the drama.'

That is also the shame of the Tour de France, the consequence of years of cheating. So intense did the presumption of guilt become this year that near the end of the race a witch-hunt atmosphere reigned among journalists and the public.

This was understandable considering the circumstances and the high profiles of soime of the alleged cheaters.

One was pre-race favourite Alexandre Vinokourov of Kazakhstan, who injured his knees in a crash during the first week and later won two stages thanks to another person's red blood cells, tests revealed.

The report that Vinokourov had tested positive to having undergone a homologous blood transfusion before the 13th stage, which he won, shook the Tour de France to its core.

The effect was so dramatic because of his stature and because his performance seemed to exemplify the courage and intensity of sport at its very best.

He was immediately suspended and his Astana team was asked to leave the race, but the damage had been done.

The next day, dozens of riders staged a brief sit-down protest against the use of banned substances. Prominent among the protestors was the French Cofidis team.

So the shock was greater than it might have been when it was revealed during the running of the stage that a Cofidis rider, Italian Christian Moreni, had tested positive for synthetic testosterone.

Moreni confessed and apologized, and Cofidis became the second team to drop out of the Tour de France.

Then came the Rasmussen debacle. Danish rider Michael Rasmussen was dropped by the Danish national cycling team, during the running of the Tour, for having lied about his whereabouts to avoid two out-of-competition tests.

Although he had never failed a drug test, and did not during the Tour, it was immediately assumed that Rasmussen was cheating. It did not help that he was wearing the race leader's yellow jersey, which made of him a symbol of the race - and an easy target.

Four days before the end of the Tour, the managers of his Rabobank team kicked him out for having lied to them about his whereabouts in June, when he was to have been tested. That left the race without a leader for one day, an apt symbol for the event.

And yet the Tour did not deserve any of this, as Clerc quite reasonably put it. They were not informed in time of Rasmussen's laxity and lies; and the positive tests showed that the system was working and that the Tour was serious about exposing the cheaters.

But the blood was in the water, and the sharks were hungry. Unconfirmed rumours became headlines and French television commentators wondered openly if any of the leaders in the Tour were clean.

The German public television stations ARD and ZDF stopped broadcasting the Tour live and several newspapers, such as the Berliner Zeitung and the French daily Liberation, simply stopped considering the Tour a sporting event and reported on it, when they mentioned it at all, in their crime pages.

Amidst all this intrigue and controversy, there was even a little bit of sport - but it was lost in the chaos and the recriminations.

For the record, a young Spaniard named Alberto Contador won the Tour de France - by default, since he inherited the lead after Rasmussen was booted and hung on to it by riding fast enough to hold a lead of 23 seconds over the rider in second place, Cadel Evans of Australia.

But even as the 24-year-old Contador prepared to celebrate his title, a report in the daily Le Monde suggested that he had received special treatment when he was exonerated of involvement in a Spanish blood doping scandal.

At a press conference following Saturday's time trial, in which he virtually clinched the title, he had to answer questions about that story.

Asked if he would furnish a sample of his DNA to verify his story, he replied that he would 'if it became necessary.' And he added: 'I am innocent. It is not up to me to prove my innocence.'

But he was wrong.

It will almost certainly take years before participants in the Tour of France will again enjoy what is the simple privilege of most other athletes in sports far less regulated than cycling - indeed, of most people living in democratic societies - the presumption of innocence.